Abstract

CASTRO, Josué Tomasini. "Go and tell your people": interpretations and mediations in the anthropological work. Bol. Mus. Para. Emilio Goeldi Cienc. Hum. [online]. 2008, vol.3, n.1, pp.79-91. ISSN 1981-8122.

Anthropologists are translators, interpreters of a culture, of social practices. But what then qualify them as truly interpreters of a society, a group, or a cultural environment? If there is no consent about possible answers to this question, there is no doubt about the place where the final translation will occur: the writing. However, it does not prove the truthfulness of things described, but gives shape to one truth that is not exactly the one 'natives' want to be told ("go and tell your people"). What is revealed in ethnographies is a hybrid object that can only be described using what James Clifford said to be "powerful lies of exclusion and rhetoric". In this article, the discussion about the writing of ethnographies and some aspects that underwrite and determine it will be on its theoretical base. Such questions will finally be confronted with the experience of the researcher himself, based upon a fieldwork in Namibia, in the village of Okondjatu, among a Herero group. It is intended, thereafter, to discuss some general aspects about anthropologists' experience of speaking its truth about an "other", of "describe identities" and possess, generally, the dangerous aspect of spokesperson and cultural middleman.

Keywords : Cultural translation; Ethnography; Ethnographic constructions; Herero.

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